How to watch Charlottetown City Council on a Mac

Peter Rukavina

One of the outcomes of the erstwhile “smart communities” project in Charlottetown is streaming video of City Council meetings. Unfortunately the technology used for the broadcasting is proprietary Microsoft Windows Media-based, which, among other things, makes it very difficult for non-Windows users to watch the videos. But there are ways.

On an Intel Mac (i.e. a relatively modern Mac, not an older Power PC-based one) here’s what you need to do:

  1. Install rev11 of MPlayer for OS X. Note that this isn’t the current version of MPlayer for OS X, it’s the previous revision. But it’s the only one that will work, at least for the time-being.
  2. From the main MPlayer site, download and install the “Binary Codec Packages” for “Mac OS X x86” – right now the link is this one.
  3. Use MPlayer to open the links to videos you find here – like mms://142.176.19.86/Archive/Dec09.wmv, for example.

The video and audio quality are atrocious – it’s not clear how much of this is due to MPlayer and how much of it is due to the quality of the original broadcast. Oh, and you can neither rewind nor fast forward. Here’s what it looks like when it’s working:

Mac OS X
Charlottetown
City Council
Video
MPlayer

Comments

Submitted by Jonathan M. Lane on

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Hi Peter,

I was wondering if you know the reason why you have to user Revision 11 of MPlayer for Mac OS X in specific for the MMS playback to work? I ask because myself and Ben Wedge (http://twitter.com/benwedge) were trying to work out a solution for watching the City Council stream on Macs. We were trying to use Flip4Mac + Quicktime and VLC, but did not get very far.

Just trying to see if maybe I can find the issue in specific that requires that specific build of MPlayer so I can get a copy of VLC (since I am already using it) instead that is compatible. Rather not download another application for this one use alone. Any info you can provide would be great.

Thanks for posting the workaround,

Jonathan

Submitted by Peter Rukavina on

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It says here (emphasis mine):



Installing the binary codec pack for your architecture will add support for additional proprietary codecs. For x86 (Intel), those include WMV9, RealVideo 10, QuickTime and others. For PPC they only include the Real Codecs. The x86 codec pack will not work with 64bit MPlayer. The easiest way to force Extended to use 32bit version is to use rev11, for the time being.



What you need to make VLC do (assuming it’s possible) is support the WMV9 codec.

&#160

Submitted by Jonathan M. Lane on

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Thanks for the information. That makes sense. I was attempting to get WMV9 support working with QT, but that might be more work than necessary.

Submitted by Pierre Doiron on

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Not a comment….I can’t find any other way to get to you!!

Might you have a 2010 levée schedule for the Charlottetown area. I will be a designated driver and taking 10 - 14 people to them.

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Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

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